Digital imaging technology permeates modern society. Biometric scanning, computer-generated imagery, photoshopping, and so-called “selfies” are just a few ubiquitous examples of digital imaging applications. Recently, it has been recognized that using digital imaging technology, especially images or selfies of consumers, can be useful for identifying new customers and/or marketing products to consumers. For example, some beauty care and cosmetics companies use consumer selfies to provide skin profiles to consumers and/or provide customized product and regimen recommendations. However, the increasing complexity of modern computer models, which are used to analyze these images, make it more important than ever to ensure that the image to be analyzed meets a minimum threshold of quality so that the computer model can provide a more accurate analysis.
Past attempts to improve the quality of a selfie have used various metrics and techniques to help a user capture a higher quality image, including, for example, the use of a so-called “wire frame” in which an outline or silhouette of a person's face appears on the screen of the image capture device (e.g., smart phone or digital camera display). When the wire frame appears, a user aligns their face with the wire frame and then takes a selfie. While the wire frame approach may help with positioning the face properly, it does not address the variety of other factors that can influence the quality of selfie (e.g., lighting, shadowing, occlusion, facial expressions, blur). Accordingly, there is a need to provide an image analysis system that can help a user conveniently address more, and ideally all, of the factors that significantly affect the image quality of a selfie, thereby enabling the user to provide a higher quality selfie to an image analysis system.
Other past attempts to improve selfie quality have addressed various individual factors that affect selfie quality, but none have looked at these factors collectively to provide an overall indication of selfie quality in a consumer friendly way. Thus, there still remains a need to provide a system that combines various image quality factors into a single, convenient score, which can be used to determine whether the selfie quality is sufficient for use by image analysis software.